Discontinuous transmission (DTX) may refer to a method of momentarily powering-down, or muting, a mobile or portable wireless telephone set when there is no voice input to the set. In a typical two-way conversation, each individual speaks slightly less than half of the time. If the transmitter signal is switched on only during periods of voice input, the duty cycle of the telephone set can be cut to less than 50 percent. This conserves battery power, eases the workload of the components in the transmitter devices, and frees the voice channel so that time-division multiplexing (“TDM”) and code-division multiplexing access (“CDMA”) networks can take advantage of the available bandwidth by sharing the channel with other signals. On the receiver side, the speech decoder generates comfort noise matching the background noise during DTX to avoid annoying effect of “total silence” when the transmission is switched off.
Among others, it has been established that the DTX operation in wireless networks such as GSM networks and CDMA networks provides a number of advantages, some of which may include, but are not limited to, saving power and battery usage in the user equipment and reducing the overall interference and load in the networks. This optimizes the overall efficiency of a wireless voice communication system. The downlink DTX improves the overall carrier to interference (“C/I”) levels in the network, which results in better spectrum utilization and increased capacity.